Essential Reading

Insights from Quadrant

Insights from Quadrant

Restoring Hope: How to revitalize Australia’s economy

Andrew Stone’s important new book lays out an economic agenda that is coherent and comprehensive, yet politically achievable over the next three to five years by a federal government with the resolve to implement it.

Addressing immigration, the housing market, higher education reform, federal?state relations, energy policy, workforce participation, welfare reform, budget repair, monetary policy and financial system regulation, the book demonstrates that good government worthy of the respect and support of the Australian people is not merely possible but vital.

What others are saying of Restoring Hope:

Niall Ferguson: “This is an ambitious program of structural as well as fiscal reform. Let us hope there are politicians willing to take the risks inherent in such a radical strategy.”

Peter Costello: “Andrew Stone reminds us that improving productivity is the key to future living standards in Australia. He identifies a range of areas where this could be examined. The hard work of economic reform cannot be done without explaining the options and building public support.”

John Howard: “Andrew Stone has undertaken the difficult task of arguing in detail for a range of economic reforms. That he has done it at a time when, in the eyes of some, reform is in the doldrums is all the more praiseworthy. His analysis of the housing issue is impressive.”

Insights from Quadrant

Bitter Harvestnow on sale

Peter O’Brien’s highly readable vivisection of Dark Emu, author Bruce Pascoe’s best-selling and deeply flawed portrait of Aborigines as sedentary agriculturalists with ‘skills superior to those of the white colonisers who took their land and despoiled it’ has now been released by Quadrant Books.

Insights from Quadrant

Notes from all over

… What Climategate revealed, however, is that the climate change “experts” we’re supposed to trust just aren’t trustworthy. They lie, they cheat, they’re motivated more by grant-troughing and dodgy political activism than they are by — lol — the disinterested quest for knowledge. That was the real shocker at the time of Climategate: that the people on whose “expert” wisdom trillions of dollars worth of your money and my money are being spent on sundry green boondoggles are in fact a lousy bunch of fraudulent second-raters unfit to run a cookie bake sale, let alone a scam involving upwards of one percent of the global economy…

Meanwhile, Israel Folau attributes bushfires and brimstone to the wrong god and is further assailed by those who know for a “settled science” certainty that it is not Yahweh but Gaia inflicting the flames on carbon sots and other sinners staining their green souls with the sins of SUV ownership and an appreciation of air conditioning. If only the ousted rugby star had traded his favoured variety of religious ratbaggery for the Church of Climate Change, oh how his sporting career might have been allowed to prosper.

Folau’s sin was speaking his mind in an age when unauthorised utterances simply aren’t tolerated. In this regard, ABC Washington correspondent James Glenday could give him a few pointers on the astute omission of pertinent but inconvenient information. That talent is much appreciated at the national broadcaster, where Sarah Ferguson’s train-wreck three-part 4Corners series on Donald Trump’s fealty to Moscow made the point rather neatly. Having managed to avoid any reference or explanation that might have diminished her portrait of the US President as Putin’s puppet, she further demonstrated her ABC-worthiness by neglecting to file a post-Mueller follow-up report conceding all her earlier hints, suggestions and accusations amounted to nothing better than a melange of misinformation. Now she’s off to China with hubby Tony Jones in tow to report the goings on in Beijing, failing upwards also being an oft-seen ABC motif.

One of the great American innovations is a website, OpenSecrets.org, where individuals’ donations to politicians and parties can be looked up in a few seconds and a couple of clicks. The entries for Professor Bloch’s donations would seem to indicate a devoted and long-term Democrat with deep pockets. That information would have been useful for any of Glenday’s readers, who might not have been left with the impression that the professor’s analysis of the impeachment was that of an impartial academic, rather than that of a highly partisan four-figure-sum supporter of Hillary Clinton.

As the US blogger David Burge puts it, modern journalism is about covering stories — covering them with a pillow until the inconvenient ones show no more sign of life whatsoever. There is a haberdashery store’s supply of pillows at the ABC.

— roger franklin

Insights from Quadrant

Different when it’s a Democrat

In a functioning system, the head of the government sets foreign policy and the diplomats enact it. So naturally there’s not a chance of that in Washington. When Taylor and Kent whine that there seemed to be a “shadow foreign policy”, the shadow is theirs; they spent a day testifying that everything had been going ticketty-boo for decades just as they’d always done things – and then Trump came along and took a different view. Oh, my! Anyone would think that, as Barack Obama once proposed, “elections have consequences”.

Anyone who stayed up late last night to watch the circus on Capitol Hill will have heard committee chairman Adam Schiff make much of then-ambassador to the Ukraine Marie Yovanovich’s (above) recall to Washington. It was, he intimated, an outrageous and unprecedented assault on a fine public servant and further proof of the need to see Donald Trump ejected from the White House. Ambassadors should be immune to the imperatives of presidents, he asserted.

Essential Reading

Insights from Quadrant

Insights from Quadrant

Restoring Hope: How to revitalize Australia’s economy

Andrew Stone’s important new book lays out an economic agenda that is coherent and comprehensive, yet politically achievable over the next three to five years by a federal government with the resolve to implement it.

Addressing immigration, the housing market, higher education reform, federal?state relations, energy policy, workforce participation, welfare reform, budget repair, monetary policy and financial system regulation, the book demonstrates that good government worthy of the respect and support of the Australian people is not merely possible but vital.

What others are saying of Restoring Hope:

Niall Ferguson: “This is an ambitious program of structural as well as fiscal reform. Let us hope there are politicians willing to take the risks inherent in such a radical strategy.”

Peter Costello: “Andrew Stone reminds us that improving productivity is the key to future living standards in Australia. He identifies a range of areas where this could be examined. The hard work of economic reform cannot be done without explaining the options and building public support.”

John Howard: “Andrew Stone has undertaken the difficult task of arguing in detail for a range of economic reforms. That he has done it at a time when, in the eyes of some, reform is in the doldrums is all the more praiseworthy. His analysis of the housing issue is impressive.”

Insights from Quadrant

Bitter Harvestnow on sale

Peter O’Brien’s highly readable vivisection of Dark Emu, author Bruce Pascoe’s best-selling and deeply flawed portrait of Aborigines as sedentary agriculturalists with ‘skills superior to those of the white colonisers who took their land and despoiled it’ has now been released by Quadrant Books.

Insights from Quadrant

Notes from all over

… What Climategate revealed, however, is that the climate change “experts” we’re supposed to trust just aren’t trustworthy. They lie, they cheat, they’re motivated more by grant-troughing and dodgy political activism than they are by — lol — the disinterested quest for knowledge. That was the real shocker at the time of Climategate: that the people on whose “expert” wisdom trillions of dollars worth of your money and my money are being spent on sundry green boondoggles are in fact a lousy bunch of fraudulent second-raters unfit to run a cookie bake sale, let alone a scam involving upwards of one percent of the global economy…

Meanwhile, Israel Folau attributes bushfires and brimstone to the wrong god and is further assailed by those who know for a “settled science” certainty that it is not Yahweh but Gaia inflicting the flames on carbon sots and other sinners staining their green souls with the sins of SUV ownership and an appreciation of air conditioning. If only the ousted rugby star had traded his favoured variety of religious ratbaggery for the Church of Climate Change, oh how his sporting career might have been allowed to prosper.

Folau’s sin was speaking his mind in an age when unauthorised utterances simply aren’t tolerated. In this regard, ABC Washington correspondent James Glenday could give him a few pointers on the astute omission of pertinent but inconvenient information. That talent is much appreciated at the national broadcaster, where Sarah Ferguson’s train-wreck three-part 4Corners series on Donald Trump’s fealty to Moscow made the point rather neatly. Having managed to avoid any reference or explanation that might have diminished her portrait of the US President as Putin’s puppet, she further demonstrated her ABC-worthiness by neglecting to file a post-Mueller follow-up report conceding all her earlier hints, suggestions and accusations amounted to nothing better than a melange of misinformation. Now she’s off to China with hubby Tony Jones in tow to report the goings on in Beijing, failing upwards also being an oft-seen ABC motif.

One of the great American innovations is a website, OpenSecrets.org, where individuals’ donations to politicians and parties can be looked up in a few seconds and a couple of clicks. The entries for Professor Bloch’s donations would seem to indicate a devoted and long-term Democrat with deep pockets. That information would have been useful for any of Glenday’s readers, who might not have been left with the impression that the professor’s analysis of the impeachment was that of an impartial academic, rather than that of a highly partisan four-figure-sum supporter of Hillary Clinton.

As the US blogger David Burge puts it, modern journalism is about covering stories — covering them with a pillow until the inconvenient ones show no more sign of life whatsoever. There is a haberdashery store’s supply of pillows at the ABC.

— roger franklin

Insights from Quadrant

Different when it’s a Democrat

In a functioning system, the head of the government sets foreign policy and the diplomats enact it. So naturally there’s not a chance of that in Washington. When Taylor and Kent whine that there seemed to be a “shadow foreign policy”, the shadow is theirs; they spent a day testifying that everything had been going ticketty-boo for decades just as they’d always done things – and then Trump came along and took a different view. Oh, my! Anyone would think that, as Barack Obama once proposed, “elections have consequences”.

Anyone who stayed up late last night to watch the circus on Capitol Hill will have heard committee chairman Adam Schiff make much of then-ambassador to the Ukraine Marie Yovanovich’s (above) recall to Washington. It was, he intimated, an outrageous and unprecedented assault on a fine public servant and further proof of the need to see Donald Trump ejected from the White House. Ambassadors should be immune to the imperatives of presidents, he asserted.